The present invention relates to fault-rejecting mixers as well as applications of fault-rejecting mixers to enable fault-tolerant and/or redundant systems.
Designers of electronic systems often introduce redundancies for a variety of purposes, e.g., fault tolerance, load sharing, etc. From the perspective of fault tolerance, it is desirable that the operation of redundant system components be isolated from each other. However, such isolation may be undesirable for other design goals.
For example, in the context of voltage regulator design, multiple voltage regulators may be operated in parallel to share the burden of delivering current to a common load, as well as reduce output ripple current. To achieve these design goals, some amount of information may need to be shared among the parallel regulators. However, conventional mechanisms for sharing such information typically introduce a “single point of failure” (SPOF) into the system, defeating the goal of fault tolerance.